She stood on the gravel under the Ferris wheel, the colored lights reflecting in her hair. Above her, couples held hands in the buckets, kissed much closer to the sky. She had just enough tickets in her pocket for a single ride.
For a moment, she looked up at the swaying cars, overwhelmed by the motion, the smell of funnel cake, the bead of sweat rolling down her spine, the thumping of the bass from the faster ride across the way.
They masked deeper troubles with clinking glasses and noisy dinners. Every night, another friend over. Dinner, plated. Wine bottles, opened. Every night, the dishwasher humming just before they turned in.
In the morning, the glasses sparkled, but their eyes glazed as they wandered the kitchen, the rhythm of their hosting interrupted by sleep. They did not want to know each other, anymore, in bathrobes, with coffee.
He found her crying outside her apartment door.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I lost my key.”
He would have kissed her then, but he just put his arms around her. They were neighbors, he thought. There would be other opportunities.
Her kitchen is full of mistakes tonight—salt where there should be sugar, not an uncracked egg to be found, a hair resting on the surface of the soup.
She was more careful, once, with her measurements, with her ingredients, with her mise en place. But tonight, she went from too cautious to not cautious enough, and her dinner has turned bitter in her mouth.
“I asked for this,” she said. “I mean, didn’t I ask for this?”
He shrugged, not sure whether to stay or go.
“This, in fact, is what I demanded,” she said. “I’m glad you made up your mind.”
He shrugged again, unclear, suddenly, whether he was comfortable with all these implications.
Nowhere was the cold so pronounced as there, even though we’d battened the hatches and turned up the heat.
We fought with icy hisses, sometimes using the things of the household—dirty dishes, an item of laundry on the floor, magazines out of place—as signs to each other that we had dropped the temperature to where it could no longer sustain life.
At the café table, he taught her new vocabulary: empleado, corazón, verdad.
“El jefe is the boss,” he said, nodding along with himself. “If you’re not used to it, I’m going to help you.”
She pointed at the page with bitten nails. He wanted to loosen her ponytail, teach her words outside the proscribed curriculum.
